


You wash the blood off your hands, yet still it remains

by NebulousNids



Category: Thirteen Storeys - Jonathan Sims
Genre: Angst, Bullying, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Murder, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Middle School, Minimizing, Panic Attacks, Penny is mentioned but not here, Tommy Jackson is mentioned but not here, so anna is eleven, this takes place during the epilogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-25 10:02:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30087420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NebulousNids/pseuds/NebulousNids
Summary: ‘What about Anna? That sort of thing, at that age...’Anna is the furthest thing from okay, after everything.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	You wash the blood off your hands, yet still it remains

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place during the epilogue

The substitute teacher was fiddling with the computer at the desk. Anna didn’t pay attention to her name, choosing instead to pull out a sketchbook and start drawing something. Not anything in specific, just random doodles.  
Her actual teacher had left a note on the board saying that they would be watching a documentary, so Anna didn't bother to get out her folder, as there wasn't a proper assignment.  
The sub managed to get it working and flicked the light off.  
Anna was still able to see her sketchbook just fine, from the light coming in through the windows, so she wasn't terribly bothered.  
Then the documentary started playing.  
It was about Tobias Fell.  
c, bright red staining her lips and- no she wasn’t thinking about this. She was not going to start crying in the middle of class and she wasn’t going to need to explain to her tentative friends why Tobias Fell made her stop being able to breathe. They would not stare at her with that look and then whisper to each other and then nobody would talk to her and- Anna was not thinking about this she was not.  
She raised her hand. The sub looked at her.  
“Can I go to the bathroom?”  
“Class started five minutes ago, you should’ve gone during passing time”  
No no no nonononono she needed to leave.  
“Please?”  
“10/10 rule.”  
Anna nodded, defeated.  
She stared out the window, trying desperately to ignore the documentary. Failing to ignore the documentary.  
The person was now starting to talk about the suspects, the camera panned over a picture of each of them and Anna kept her face pointed firmly away from everyone.  
What if someone recognizes her what if what if what ifwhatifwhatifwhatif  
“... Anna Khan, seven years old at the time of the murder. When police arrived on the scene, she was soaked in blood, hair dripping to the floor-”  
Don't think don't think don't think don't look don't think don't look don't look upset don't let anyone make a connection. Her mothers warning to never tell anyone that it happened looped in her mind as the person kept droning on.  
“- But how could anyone suspect a seven-year-old of murder?-” The reporter, voiceover, whoever he was started going on about evidence found and how her fingerprints were in whatever places and how she could have torn his stomach open, but that couldn't be possible she was seven and Anna looked forcefully at the clock. It had been five minutes.  
Anna tried not to flee out the door.  
She quickly made her way to the girls bathroom and locked herself in a stall.  
Then she couldn’t keep herself from crying. She drew her knees to her chest and buried her head in her arms as she sat on the floor sobbing.  
She couldn’t shake the feeling of razor-sharp teeth carving apart his stomach like warm butter, the way his flesh was hot and sticky as she pried the wound open so she and Penny could tear at his intestines and swallow his blood. His blood, that was caked to her skin. It took what felt like weeks before the smell was entirely gone. Her parents had scrubbed her skin raw trying to clean the blood out from under her fingernails, made her take shower after shower to get all the blood off. and she still picked at the skin under her fingernails, convinced there was still some left, convinced that the red dripping down her fingers and the smell that made her choke was still his blood, and not her own that she’d drawn on accident.  
As she shakily brought her fingers to her mouth to check to make sure her teeth were normal she tasted blood and realized with a surge of panic at the taste, that she’d scraped the skin off her fingers again without realizing. She was breathing too quickly, could hardly get enough air in, her face was stained in tears and blood and- and was there blood? She couldn't tell she couldn’t breathe- what was the grounding mechanism her therapist made her learn? Something about counting and senses? 5 things you see, 4 you hear, and so on?  
She forced herself to look up.  
She cast her eyes around the cramped stall for 5 things. Her bloody fingers which she was not thinking about. The toilet. The lock on the door. Three. Two more. A discarded pencil on the ground. Four. Did the ceiling count? The lightbulb.  
Four things she heard. Her own breathing, which was slowing down. She strained her ears. She could faintly hear a teacher yelling a few hallways down. Footsteps, a security guard walking past. Three. A door slammed. Four.  
Three things she… smelled? Felt? Three things she could feel, maybe. The floor. It was cold. Her back pressed uncomfortably to the stall, the bottom edge of the wall was digging into her spine. That was two. Her face was wet from tears. She wiped her face on her sleeve, trying to clean herself up a bit. She didn't want to pay attention to what she smelled or tasted.  
She shakily stood up and walked over to the sinks.  
Her face was blotchy and red and her nose was running. She didn't want anyone to know she’d been crying. She splashed water on her face, maybe it would help. She buried her face in some paper towel to dry it, and focused for a brief moment on the cardboardy smell of the paper that was really too rough to be considered a towel, instead of the smell of blood. She pulled her face away after a minute and used the same towel to wipe the blood off her fingers. She watched as it welled up again. She pressed the paper towel into it, it absorbed the blood again. She stared as her finger kept bleeding, the blood not really dripping, just pooling on her finger. It was slightly mesmerizing. She wondered how quickly Tobias bled when she- no she wasn't thinking about it. She shook her head slightly, pressed her fingers into the towel one last time before bunching it up and throwing it away. She took a deep breath and glanced in the mirror again. Her eyes were red, but hopefully nobody would notice.  
She stepped out into the hallway and glanced at the clock. It had been half an hour.  
She didn't want to go back. She really didn't want to go back. There were still fifteen minutes until class ended though.  
She wiped her hands on her shirt, unconsciously trying to get rid of the blood.  
She picked a direction and started walking. She walked the entire length of the school, trying to avoid hallways with classrooms with open doors, until there were 5 minutes left. She made her way back to her classroom with three minutes to spare, and quietly slipped in through the slightly cracked open door. Anna walked over to her desk and put her sketchbook away as everyone else packed up as well. She slung her bag over her shoulder and refused to make eye contact with the sub, instead staring at the clock above the door like everyone else.  
Her one friend in the class didn't bother asking if she was okay. Even though they had the next class together as well, Anna’s friend still didn't wait to walk with her. Normally Anna would chase after them, walk with them and the rest of the group, (even though they were always late, something that always filled Anna with anxiety.) Today, however, Anna didn’t feel like fighting to be included with people who, even though they seemed to want her around, didn't always act like it.  
Anna was quiet for the rest of the day.  
Where she’d normally be chittering away, trying desperately to engage one of her friends in a conversation, (rarely succeeding), she was silent. She pushed down the feelings of bitterness that nobody seemed to notice.  
She wanted to be friends with them.  
They were friends! Sorta.  
They got annoyed when she talked for too long about something, even though she let them talk all the time without saying anything! She never interrupted them, she made a point not to. She never told them to stop, even when they were distracting her from her work. Even though they always got this look of annoyance when she talked to them.  
She didn’t even bother sitting with them to wait for school to start, or during lunch. She’d usually text Tommy, he was her friend, even though he went to a different school and was younger than her. She couldn't have her phone out during class, so she always talked to him before school and during lunch instead.  
They were her friends though! She wasn't really part of the friend group, but they were her friends… ish. Not yet, but nearly.  
Sure she always made a point of complimenting them, and they hardly noticed her. So what if she’d stayed up until midnight watching a show one of her friends recommended, and he talked excitedly about it for weeks afterwards with her, even though he didn't really let her talk about it back. Well, he did! Kinda. If she started rambling for too long though he got the look on his face and she quickly stopped speaking. So what if she recommended something to him, and he never bothered to get into it. So what that they weren't really her friends?  
Anna spent the rest of the day ignoring Tobias by thinking about her friends and how they probably hated her, and that was perfectly fine with her, because it meant she wasn't crying too hard to breathe, which always happened when she thought about Tobias.  
It was on days like this that she half wished for Penny. Half of her wanted desperately to scold Penny for making fun of them while they couldn't hear her, to let Penny drag her out of class into some sort of game. The other half of her was terrified of that. Not that it mattered, she hadn’t seen Penny since, and her parents hated when she mentioned her. Anna was almost convinced she’d made Penny up, like her mother insisted, though a nagging part of her refused to believe it. Could you even miss an imaginary friend? Someone who never existed? (She still sometimes pretended Penny existed. She would imagine Penny helping her with homework, commenting on a book Anna was reading, listening attentively as she talked about it. It only furthered her beliefs that Penny must not have existed. Anna sometimes hated that she did it, she was eleven! Eleven-year-olds aren't supposed to have imaginary friends. It helped, sometimes, but other times it felt so distinctly fake as opposed to before, she remembered how real Penny used to feel. Thinking about it for too long always started a spiral of Anna equally mourning Penny’s absence, and convincing herself there was nobody to mourn, she’d always been fake, which meant Anna could imagine her sitting right next to her)  
Her friends kept comparing who they thought did it during sixth hour, and while normally she’d eagerly join in, she instead stayed at her own desk instead of moving to “work” with them. It didn't really help, she could still clearly hear them across the room, but it was easier to tone out their attempts to blame her for murder.  
Something in her face must have darkened, though, because when she walked past their table to sharpen her pencil, one of them asked if she was okay. She just nodded, slightly startled that they cared enough to notice, a spark of happiness flashing through her that they cared until they gestured at her fingers, “You’re bleeding”  
“Oh- it's nothing” She hadn’t realized she’d picked the scabs off again, or maybe they never scabbed over in the first place.  
“Here, I have a bandaid” She took it from the outstretched hand, and it put it on.  
They still cared, it was still good. They just noticed the blood, instead of anything else.  
They didn't beckon her to sit with them, and she wasn't sure she would have anyways.  
She told her parents her day was good when the final bell rang and she clambered into the car to go home.  
They believed her, and another needle of bitterness stung her, even though the last thing she wanted was for them to think she wasn't over Tobias.  
She said she had a lot of homework, and locked herself in her room.  
She didn't, not really, but she didn't want to be around anyone.  
She spent the next several hours descending into youtube and free online games to distract herself from her thoughts, and waiting desperately for the next day.  
Nobody ever noticed the scabs on her fingers.  
She wanted to tell someone about Tobias, but her mother was quite firm that nothing happened.  
She was fine.  
She was fine.  
Maybe if she told herself she was fine often enough she’d believe it.  
Everything was fine.

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr: @nebulousnids16


End file.
